Towards an Architecture for Artificial Animated Creatures

This work presents a software methodology used to implement artiicial animated creatures. The proposed architecture deals with dynamics and kinematics issues and provides a well structured way to control the creature resources. Three artiicial creatures with diierent sen-sors/actuators/dynamics characteristics show the versatility of the architecture.\Roger-the-Crab" simulates a crab-like creature, with two eyes (cameras) and two arms. The simulator \The-Worm" is a multi-link creature similar to an earth-worm. The last platform is the LPR-UMASS articulated \Stereo-Head" robot. As a practical result, by using the same control structure, the above arti-cial animated creatures are able to perform different tasks, involving the construction of atten-tional maps of their environments from sensory information and progression on a rough terrain.